


He Who Fights With Monsters

by rusting_roses



Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Gen, Holocaust
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-23
Updated: 2012-05-23
Packaged: 2017-11-05 21:33:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,642
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/411241
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rusting_roses/pseuds/rusting_roses
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster ~Friedrich Nietzsche</p>
            </blockquote>





	He Who Fights With Monsters

This, at least, is familiar: the way when the battle is over and done Steve strips out of his Captain America uniform in the privacy of his own apartment with fingers still shaking from adrenaline and relief.

Back in the war, before he Fell, he used to try and hide his trembling nerves from his men. Steve didn't dare show such vulnerability, not because of anything the Howling Commandos would do, but for his own sanity. He needed that sacred privacy to fall apart, just for a handful of seconds, and put himself back together in ways that wouldn't make his chest ache. He would just go off after a mission, claiming he needed to take a piss or something and he would shake from top to toe that they'd managed to get out in one piece, that somehow his own youth and stupidity hadn't forced Colonel Phillips to send another letter entitled, _Dear Sir or Madam_ —

The Avengers are fine, though, somehow. It's a miracle Steve hadn't looked for, not when he considered the odds. Of course, they're covered with scrapes and bruises and burns and there are probably even a few fractures that he hasn't been told about, but they're in one piece. Breathing. Living.

They will recover.

After they lead a quiescent and subdued Loki back to the Helicarrier, they go back out for shawarma, silently and without discussing the matter. They simply go, and eat, and exist together for precious minutes before reality drags them out, bleeding and exhausted, into the light. Fury has them do a million and a half things, debriefs them, and finally, finally, _finally_ sends them all on their way, with strict orders to rest for at least forty-eight hours.

So here Steve is, standing beneath the burning hot water of his shower, covered in marks from Loki and the Chitauri, muscles quivering, and it seems strange that for the first time since he Woke Up, it feels like home.

~*~

He still spends more time in the SHIELD gym than is probably strictly good for him, is still wary around his new teammates on the rare times he sees them. He likes them more than he thought he would at the beginning, he just doesn't always know what to do or say around them when they don't have a war brewing. He still finds himself baffled by pop culture references for the most part and can barely find his way around the city he can grew up in. Nightmares come, perhaps not quite as frequently as before, but he awakens often enough sweat-soaked and sobbing, drowning in the knowledge that he survived when so many did not. He lies to his psychiatrists, despite the fact that Steve is sure mean well, because they are utterly unable to comprehend what he's going through, even if they give him all sorts of new names for problems he's been tackling since he went after Bucky that first time.

In a lot of ways, it's _awful_.

It feels like Steve is just barely eking out an existence on a tightrope and that he's liable to fall into the endless depths below. They call him a Man Out of Time, but that doesn't even begin cover his fears. He's a man out of his depth, stuck in a featureless grey expanse of which he can't see the end.

Even with all of that wrapped around his limbs, dragging him down, Steve finally has the desire to fight back. He can't give up, not when he carries Bucky and Phil Coulson's name etched beneath his skin, not when he sees the way New York slowly recovers, not when he knows that all of this might happen again. He might not be able to stop it, but he's damn well going to try.

During the first two months, when he had been Woken Up, he'd spent most of his time under the care of SHIELD scientists, performing everything from cognitive exams to stress tests to reporting what he remembered before he Fell. When they'd been satisfied, they'd set him up with a fully furnished apartment with a number of books and told him to spend his time catching up.

Steve had ignored the books in favor of reading the news and watching the television, watching all the things the United Stated of America had lost during his seven decade absence. It was overwhelming; he didn't even know what kind of bullying cyber-bulling was, but it seemed like a different child had committed suicide because of it every time he mustered up the courage to turn the television on. Newscasters spoke endlessly about the war in Iraq, yet another battlefield when Steve had hoped they were done with all that after the Second World War. Discussions of gay marriage had everyone putting in their two cents—and it took Steve longer than it probably should have to piece together that they meant homosexuals getting married, a concept so far from his own frame of reference he wasn't even sure what he thought.

It had been disheartening, and made Steve feel ancient in a way that nothing else did.

Now, though, he was determined to start from the beginning, to understand where the threads of his world had been lost into this futuristic land. He wanted to carve himself out a place here, however hard-won. He wasn't going to give up—he hadn't before he Fell, and there was no reason to start now. Not now, not _ever_.

Steve picked up the top book to the stack he'd been given and ignored for so long, which started with the Second World War, and began reading.

~*~

The nightmares kept him from sleeping that night.

~*~

Whatever he was expecting when he started this, what he found wasn't it. He was expecting to try and familiarize himself with what people now and days thought of the war, and to go from there. He was expecting to silently judge them for the way they made it sound sanitized, tidy, as they had when Steve had been in school.

Steve wasn't expecting this, though, and it ate him up, leaving newly wounded flesh where he'd hoped he'd finally healed. He got his hands on every bit of material he could about the war, hoping against hope that it would turn out to be some giant hoax, because even that would be easier to face than the truth. The panic attacks and flashbacks got worse for a while, though he hid them as well as ever, but they only furthered the damage until he couldn't even trust himself not to flinch walking down the street.

It drove him to his motorcycle late one night—late enough that it was really early one morning—roughly pulling his leather jacket over his shirt with one hand while he shoved his wallet into his pocket with the other. He turned over the engine and just left. Steve left the city, left the only place he'd thought he'd really known, and headed south with a single destination in mind.  
It was a long trip, nearly five hours even with Steve carelessly breaking the speed limits as he coaxed a little more speed from the machine between his legs, as though Lucifer himself was at Steve's heels. He saw nothing but the road ahead of him, forever traveling south. When he finally hit Washington, D.C., he stopped only long enough to pick up a tourist's map, swiping the little bit of plastic he'd been given that was somehow supposed to represent money to pay for it. It led him exactly where he needed to go, and he finally managed to wedge his motorbike in the narrow space between two cars a block away from the main entrance.

Without pause, Steve marched into the United Stated Holocaust Memorial Museum.

~*~

Much later, Steve finally emerged, feeling as though he'd lived out every single one of the sixty-eight years he'd been asleep and they had not been kind to him. He stood, blinking rapidly in the sunshine as he tried to keep the tears from falling. He bowed his head, mouth tight, and keeping his head down, he just started walking.

He'd been to D.C. a handful of times, while he'd been a part of the USO. They always wanted to show him off like a prize that they'd won, but he'd managed to escape once or twice. Even so, the city had changed so much since the war years and Steve couldn't even see the echoes of how it used to be, as he could with New York. It was like a blow to his ribs that he had to steel himself against.

Eventually, even his strength wearied. He hadn't slept in at least two days, and hadn't slept _well_ for two weeks. The only reason he'd managed the drive down to D.C. in the first place was because his heart had been pounding with adrenaline and rage and fear. Now he was listless, feeling worn thin and exposed with the crush of city living around him.

He dropped thoughtlessly into a park bench, head dropping into his hands as he stifled the sharp sob that had nestled itself in his breastbone. Crossing himself, he whispered, "Heavenly Father, may those lost souls rest in Your Grace and find happiness in Heaven where they found suffering on Earth. Amen." He crossed himself again, and then let his hands fall, utterly drained.

The sounds of the city swelled around him for long minutes: the honking of horns, the chatter of people, the distant echo of trains and subways. "You look like you could use this."

Steve's gaze slowly turned upwards, too tired to even be startled by Natasha's sudden presence. She held out an enormous coffee cup to him, and he grasped it gratefully. Taking a sip, he was relieved to find that it was plain Americano, with plenty of cream and sugar, something that was once an unimaginable luxury in the midst of wartime rations. He'd never particularly liked coffee, and the amount of caffeine present would have required him to drink gallons of the stuff before he felt its effect. Still, on those rare occasions when the Howling Commandos had access, Steve had gratefully taken some, and let the drink warm him all the way through in the chill of the mountains. He'd learned to take warmth where he could get it in those days.

Now, though, Steve took it as rich as he could stand, unable to keep from luxuriating in this small excess that, when paired with the warm coffee, pooled as heat in his chest. "Thank you," he said quietly.

Natasha shrugged, sitting gracefully with her own cup. "It was a long trip."

Steve knew, of course, that SHIELD at least generally kept an eye on him—he hadn't forgotten Natasha's comment about them all being on SHIELD's watchlist, after all—but he was a little surprised that they'd sent Natasha after him. Then again, maybe he shouldn't be surprised at all. Natasha was his teammate, and starting to become a friend, or so Steve hoped. Perhaps she would even understand, a little.

Natasha waited in patient silence as Steve drank the coffee. For his part, Steve stared out over the small patch of greenery the bench sat near, watching at people and cars and animals passed by.

"It feels like I never even fought the same war." The words were sudden, crisp, and sharp. "Oh, we knew bad things were happening in Germany, in all of the Axis nations, really. Well, I mean, not at first we didn't know, not me at least. I was in the USO, and then the mission to rescue Bucky in Austria was sort of spur of the moment, and I then was all tied up in Hydra. We were keeping Red Skull contained, keeping him from finishing his work, keeping him from taking over the world like Hitler wanted to, and I didn't have much time to think of anything beyond that. We saved lives, me and the Howlin' Commandos, with what we did."

Natasha took a sip, and then nodded. "Without you, Red Skull's strike would have effectively brought the United States to its knees, and the other Allied Powers shortly after. He would have won." The words were simple and direct. Her face never changed, remaining cool and neutral.

Steve took a deep breath and then continued, "So why does it feel like I failed?"

Natasha said nothing.

"All I can think about is how—how I should have _been_ there. If I'd known how bad the—the _death camps_ ," he spat out the word, "were, I would have done something. Anything would be better than knowing...and they did know! How could they...how could they not care?! It's...it's..." Words, which had already been a struggle, failed him completely, and Steve gestured forcibly, nearly spilling his coffee.

"The pictures I saw, and the reports, and the memoirs, they're...we all knew Hitler was a power-hungry dictator who'd watch the world burn given half a chance, but it's one thing to hear stories and another to look at the footage of people being gassed, of them being shoveled into the crematoriums. It was awful. I thought I'd seen horrible things with Hydra, with what Schmidt's men were willing to do, what they _did_ , I mean, I saw Bucky, I saw what they'd done to him, I was there for the nightmares. Yet what they did there—the Roma had it right, it is the Porraimos, the Devouring, the eating of everything innocent in the world."

Steve paused, once more struggling with words, and then demanded tremulously, "How could they—how could they have done that? Children, not even a year old, gassed to death in their mothers arms, or killed for sport with a bullet through their skulls. How could this have happened?! What sort of _monsters_ —"

"No."

The word sliced deep, opening flesh and bone with such ease that it was a second before Steve could feel the pain of it, the rage of it, thick and hot and damp in his throat.

"No," Natasha said again, more quietly. "Because _that's_ how it happens. They're monsters. They're enemies. They're dangerous. They're going to do it to me. They are not us. That's how it happens." She smiled thinly, with no warmth and no humor. "You stop thinking they're people, and all of a sudden, everything's so much neater." Her eyes slid to his, dark and cold. "That's how you end up with red in your ledger."

She then shrugged a little and looked off in the middle distance, composure cracking slightly. "For what it's worth, there have been studies that have tried to look at how those involved validated what they did, too. Reduce people to numbers, to enemies, to diseases, to objects, and you'd be surprised what you can get people to do."

"It doesn't make it right."

"No, it doesn't."

Steve's breath caught. "Then—" he faltered. "Then, how do you...how do you..." he didn't know how to ask the question, but fortunately, Natasha seemed to know what he wanted to say.

"You remember that they're mothers, and sons, and cousins. You are merciful not just when you want to be, but whenever it's possible. You weigh against the red in your ledger by doing what you believe is right, every day." She shrugged, and gazed up at the clear sky. "You don't forget. Never forget."

Steve bowed his head again, turning away from Natasha. "Is that ever enough?" he asked. His voice was rough with unshed tears.

Natasha slid closer to him, warm, slim body bringing surprising comfort as she pressed their sides together with rare kindness. "I don't know, but it's the best we've got."

**Author's Note:**

> This fic was the result of both a class this past semester on the Holocaust, and my own experiences with hearing my grandmother/grandfather, who grew up in Poland, talk about what they went through. Try as I might, I just couldn't let it go. My heart goes out to everyone who was affected by this tragedy.


End file.
